The XML Internet takes off

The phenomenal growth of the Internet owes much to HTML's (HyperText Markup Language) ability to present multimedia information in a standardized, vendor-independent way. Now, with the standardization of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Internet's next stage-standardized

Like everything else about the Internet, XML has been hyped to death, but because it really is now the most important Internet standard, the stakes are high. As XML evolves, we will see major battles between different versions and uses of XML, and incredible complexity to implement and translate among them.

What Is XML?

XML is an object-oriented standard for tagging data and creating documents. Its greatest strength is that it separates the presentation of data from the definition of the data. With HMTL, an application has no way to identify specific data elements-e.g., the price of something. In effect, the program has to do the Web-era equivalent of screen-scraping-parsing HTML based on where in the data stream the element you want will be located. It's an ugly and fragile process.